Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to properly link to products from category pages?
-
Hi All,
We have an e-commerce website and the category pages are built so that there is a product image and below it there is the title. Both the image and the title are in a href (each on its own).
I encountered the following unfinished discussion here at MOZ:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-optimize-achor-text-links-on-ecommerce-category-page#post-93758The discussion states that its improper.
The question is - if it is wrong then why? (maybe because Google will give its weight to the image anchor instead of the text anchor since it is higher in the page).
The other question is how to resolve the matter?
Should I add nofollow to the image href?Thanks
-
Dear Everett,
Can you supply the link to the article?
Thanks
-
Also see this page for more information on using named anchor links (i.e. page.html#image) to avoid the "first link counts" issue. This is what Alan Mosley is recommending. I think it is much safer than using CSS to try and "trick" search engines. You can put the image on product pages in a named anchor like #image.
Resources:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/3-ways-to-avoid-the-first-link-counts-rule
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-first-link-counts-rule-and-the-hash-sign
-
No problem, glad I could help!
-
Works amazing!!!!!
Thanks a lot for all of your help.
-
I would do something like this: http://jsfiddle.net/D7vMG/3/ (do you see the z-indexes? it makes sure the anchor is higher positioned then the paragraph.)
You can of course use only the <a>-tag and not a heading. In that case you can put the position: absolute on the a-tag.</a>
<a>Hope it helps! Good luck!</a>
-
THANKS!!! I've been working on it since your first reply
Last question (I'm a bit rude now) -
I also have price beneath "The New Ipad" anchor. Currently it is not in the href and I'm thinking of keeping it this way (which would mean it will be in the H3 but not in the href).
Also, the href's are simple href's not surrounded by h3's, What do you think? Changing them? (keeping the price outside the href but inside the H3)
It seems correct but changing would mean of a lot of anchors will be changed on the entire website... scarry
-
Yeah of course, you can style the link any way you want. Even hide it
although I wouldn't recommend that hehe.
I made this jsfiddle for you: http://jsfiddle.net/D7vMG/1/
good luck trying it yourself!
-
It is pretty much as if the anchor flows over the entire image.
I did this a while back on a dutch telecom website called typhone dot nl. Check it out, it's on the frontpage (the offer blocks all have it)
The H3 is just there as an example. If I just got an H1 above all products, i use h2's, if there is a h2, i use h3's. and so on.
-
That's what the css code above does, it puts the link beneath the image visually when users look at the site, while keeping the link above the image in the actual code.
-
I should not of said 2 pages, but it has been shown that both links will give link text relevancy.
The javascript link will be followed, it will not help
-
Is there a way to do so and having the link appearing beneath the image?
I don't want to change the design
-
Dear Alan,
If Google will see it as two pages I'm guessing I will need to add a canonical to the # version. Is that the case?
What about having the image with a javascript link? (location.href) or is that suspicious?
-
Dont use no-follow, you will just leak link juice.
One way around this, is to use a anchor # in your url for the image. like page.html#someterm
This will in fact give you link text relevancy for both, google will see this as 2 different pages.
Make sure you have alt text for the image.
This tataic and well as what x-com may in the future be seen as over optimization, so it may be tter to do somthing like this
Your link text
You can just link the whole lot in the one link.
Or move your text to above the image.
-
Thank you for the answer.
I'm not too strong with css besides for the basics,
what you mean is that the anchor will be displayed beneath the image for the user even though the code is placed before the image and also that clicking on the image will actually be like clicking on the anchor since its size includes the image???
Brilliant, it will also give more "engagement credit" to the anchor instead of splitting it (actually ppl usually clicking on the image).
By the way, do you put all of your products on the page as H3?
Thanks
-
Hi Noamflint, we develop a lot of e-commerce websites and I want to fill you in how we tackled this problem several months ago and how.
We deleted the anchor of the image! In our code it looks something like:
The New iPad
As you see at the moment there is no anchor on the image, but our clients do want this. because of usabilty. and people just love clicking images.
We solved this with CSS:
div { position: relative; padding-top: 30px; display: block; }
div h3 { position: absolute; top: 0px; left: 0px; display: block; }
div h3 a { width: 200px; height: 230px; display: block; }
div img { width: 200px; height: 200px; display: block; }
This code above is pseudo of course, but i hope you see what we are trying to accomplish. The anchor tag is positioned absolute in the parent div. With the dimensions on it, the link is above the image, so when people hover the image. they automatically hover the link. Clicking in it, takes them to the detail page.
You should try it! Maybe it will help you out.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Topical keywords for product pages and blogs
Hi all, I have a question regarding keywords. Of course we all know that keyword research should be focused on a certain topic and on user intent (and thus on answering specific questions) instead of trying to put keywords in a page to make it rank. However, duplicate content is of course still an issue. So here's my question: A client that sells floor heating systems that you can install yourself, has a product page for this topic and blog pages for questions regarding this topic. So following pages are on the website: Product page about the floor heating systems the client sells Blog article with tips how to install a floor heating system yourself Blog article about how to choose the right floor heating system These pages all answer different questions and are written about different topics. However, inevatibly all these pages also talk about different aspects of floor heating systems so this broad term comes up on all pages naturally. You could say that a solution is to merge pages and redirect the blogs to the product page, so the product page would answer all questions. But that is not what a customer is looking for. The goal of a product page is to trigger a conversion: let a customer contact the company or ask for a price offer. If the content on a product page is not comprehensive enough, the goal gets lost. Moreover, it doesn't make sense to talk about tips and tricks on a product page. So how do you tackle this problem without creating duplicate content? In search results, the blog pages rank for the specific questions, but the product page doesn't rank for the generic term 'floor heating'. The internal link structure is ok: the product page has obviously more incoming links than the blogs. All on page SEO factors are taken care of as well. Any ideas on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Best Practices for Title Tags for Product Listing Page
My industry is commercial real estate in New York City. Our site has 300 real estate listings. The format we have been using for Title Tags are below. This probably disastrous from an SEO perspective. Using number is a total waste space. A few questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-Should we set listing not no index if they are not content rich?
-If we do choose to index them, should we avoid titles listing Square Footage and dollar amounts?
-Since local SEO is critical, should the titles always list New York, NY or Manhattan, NY?
-I have red that titles should contain some form of branding. But our company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space. That would take up way too much space. Even "Metro Manhattan" is long. DO we need to use the title tag for branding or can we just focus on a brief description of page content incorporating one important phrase? Our site is: w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . c o m <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Turnkey Flatiron Tech Space | 2,850 SF $10,687/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Gallery, Office Rental | Midtown, W. 57 St | 4441SF $24055/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Open Plan Loft |Flatiron, Chelsea | 2414SF $12,874/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Tribeca Corner Loft | Varick Street | 2267SF $11,712/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| 275 Madison, LAW, P7, 3,252SF, $65 - Manhattan, New York |0 -
Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
My blog is indexing only the archive and category pages
Hi there MOZ community. I am new to the QandA and have a question. I have a blog Its been live for months - but I can not get the posts to rank in the serps. Oddly only the categories rank. The posts are crawled it seems - but seen as less important for a reason I don't understand. Can anyone here help with this? See here for what i mean. I have had several wp sites rank well in the serps - and the posts do much better. Than the categories or archives - super odd. Thanks to all for help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | walletapp0 -
Ranking Page - Category vs. Blog Post - What is best for CTR?
Hi, I am not sure wether I shall rank with a category page, or create a new post. Let me explain... If I google for 'Basic SEO' I see an article from Rand with Authorship markup. That's cool so I can go straight to this result because I know there might be some good insight. BUT: 'Basic SEO' is also an category at MOZ an it is not ranking. On the other hand, if I google for 'advanced SEO' then the MOZ category for 'advanced SEO' is ranking. But there is no authorship image, so users are much less likely to click on that result. Now, I want to rank for a very important keyword for me (content keyword, not transactional). Therefor, I have a category called 'yoga exercises'. But shall I rather create an post about them only to increase CTR due to Google Authorship? I read in Google guidelines that Authorship on homepage an category pages are not appreciated. Hope you have some insights that can help me out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal0 -
Shopify Product Variants vs Separate Product Pages
Let's say I have 10 different models of hats, and each hat has 5 colors. I have two routes I could take: a) Make 50 separate product pages Pros: -Better usability for customer because they can shop for just masks of a specific color. We can sort our collections to only show our red hats. -Help SEO with specific kw title pages (red boston bruins hat vs boston bruins hat). Cons: -Duplicate Content: Hat model in one color will have almost identical description as the same hat in a different color (from a usability and consistency standpoint, we'd want to leave descriptions the same for identical products, switching out only the color) b) Have 10 products listed, each with 5 color variants Pros: -More elegant and organized -NO duplicate Content Cons: -Losing out on color specific search terms -Customer might look at our 'red hats' collection, but shopify will only show the 'default' image of the hat, which could be another color. That's not ideal for usability/conversions. Not sure which route to take. I'm sure other vendors must have faced this issue before. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore0 -
How to properly link network of microsites and main sites?
Law firm has a main brand site (lawfirmname.com) with lots of content focusing on personal injury related areas of law. They also do other unrelated areas of law such as bankruptcy and divorce. They have a separate website for bankruptcy and a separate one for divorce. These websites have good quality content, a backlinking campaign, and are fairly large websites, with landing pages for different cities. They also have created local microsites in the areas of bankruptcy and divorce that target specific smaller cities that the main bankruptcy site and divorce site do not target well. These microsites have a good deal of original content and the content is mostly specific to the city the website is about, and virtually no backlinks. There are about 15 microsites for cities in bankruptcy and 10 in divorce and they rank pretty well for these city specific local searches. None of these sites are linked at all, and all 28 of the sites are under the same hosting account (all are subdomains of root domain of hosting account). Question, should I link these sites together at all and if so how? I considered making a simple and general page on the lawfirmname.com personal injury site for bankruptcy and divorce (lawfirmname.com/bankruptcy and lawfirmname.com/divorce) and then saying on the page something to the effect of "for more information on bankruptcy go to our main bankruptcy site at ....." and putting the link to the main bankruptcy site. Same for divorce. This way users can go to lawfirmname.com site and find Other Practice Areas, go to bankruptcy page, and link to main bankruptcy site. Is this the best way to link to these two main sites for bankruptcy and divorce or should I be linking upward? Secondly, should I link the city specific microsites to any of the other sites or leave them completely separate? Thirdly, should all of these sites be hosted on the same account or is this something that should be changed? I was considering not linking the city specific sites at all, but if I did this I didn't know if I should create different hosting accounts for them (which could be expensive). The sites work well in themselves without being linked, but wanted to try to network them in some way if possible without getting penalized or causing any issues with the search engines. Any help would be appreciated on how to network and host all of these websites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | broca777110 -
Magento: URLs for Products in Multiple Categories
I am working in Magento to build out a large e-commerce site with several thousand products. It's a great platform, but I have run into the issue of what it does to URLs when you put a product into multiple categories. Basically, "a book" in two categories would make two URLs for one product: 1) /books/a-book 2) author-name/a-book So, I need to come up with a solution for this. It seems I have two options: Found this from a Magento SEO article: 'Magento gives you the ability to add the name of categories to path for product URL's. Because Magento doesn't support this functionality very well - it creates duplicate content issues - it is a very good idea to disable this. To do this, go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set "Use categories path for product URL's to "no".' This would solve the issues and be a quick fix, but I think it's a double edged sword, because then we lose the SEO value of our well named categories being in the URL. Use Canonical tags. To be fair, I'm not even sure this is possible. Even though it is creating different URLs and, thus, poses a risk of "duplicate content" being crawled, there really is only one page on the admin side. So, I can't go to all of the "duplicate" pages and put a canonical tag, because those duplicate pages don't really exist on the back-end. Does that make sense? After typing this out, it seems like the best thing to do probably will be to just turn off categories in the URL from the admin side. However, I'd still love any input from the community on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing.SCG0